Thing is though, artists are people.

If it's funny enough, the art is secondary. If the at is perfect, the joke still needs to be at least passable.

Just because it's human made, doesn't mean it's automatically good.

Sometimes the bad art becomes its own part of the joke (xkcd).

This place loves AI. Constantly tossed in my feed.

What would you base that supposition on?

They can do something more productive.

Generative ai is just a tool for creating text and images. Not everything created using is art, just like not every piece of text written by a human or an bunch of pixels drawn in photoshop is art. What matters is intention of the author, the effort put in and whether other people perceive it as art.

It silly to call everything created by ai as art, but not because of the tool used. Most of it is not art simply because it was not created for that purpose, it is there for pure silly entertainment.

It is equally silly to vehemently hate it if the creator does not even claim it's art.

people can't tell when I spit onetheir food… I guess that means it's perfectly fine for them to eat spit, right?… good to know

The lack of karma also does wonders in this. It means people sharing AI-generated content will do it when they genuinely think others will enjoy it, so it's only a handful of pictures that turned out good. They won't for example mass produce them to farm upvotes here.

EDIT: I know sunshine is talking about a PieFed feature, and what I'm saying applies to Lemmy and Piefed. Point still stands, no karma = no reason to farm karma.

I've got people praising my poorly drawn graphs, of all things. 5min stuff like this:

So yes, odds are they'll like your drawings better over mass produced AI slop.

I do think you're raising valid concerns regarding resource consumption + climate change. However:

youre just trying to justify it.

Learn to phrase things without disingenuously putting words into the others' mouths dammit. This is not Reddit, behave like a decent person instead of a redditor. Nothing the other user said can be even remotely interpreted as "the energy cost is justified", in fact they didn't even talk about resource consumption.

I understood this and now my back hurts!

It’s funny, and it doesn’t hurt anyone.

It sure sounds to me like they were trying to justify it. Funny or not, if it hurts everyone so no, it's not a justified use. Hurting anyone, let alone everyone, just for the lolz is far from acceptable.

"It doesn't hurt anyone." does not automatically lead to "I think the energy consumption and its impact is justified", unless the user claimed 1) that they're aware of the impact, and 2) that they're sharing that comment as a counterpoint to that impact.

(Note I'm not even disagreeing with their core argument. Seriously, I low key want to use image generation for some stuff, but when I think on the energy usage I simply "eh... let's not." I think the way you phrased it in another comment is way better.)

How I read the image:

In the song, Badger is a monotone repetition, hence being the X axis. When Mushroom comes in, it pitches up, hence being the Y axis. Then, when Snake comes in it fluctuates in pitch with an overall rise.

The humor is clever enough on its own, but the roughly sketched chart with clipart sells the fact that the joke is in the delivery and being sent quickly without being overly refined to the point that it looks polished. The rough rounding of the background makes it even more funny for me, because it was like an attempt was made.

Peak artistic humor by looking like an idea was thrown together to get the joke out as fast as possible. Maybe it was quick, maybe it took time to do for the end result, but the look comes through.

Perfection

Art is self-expression. And I don't think we (people in general) should be encouraged to be more productive; instead we should be encouraged to express ourselves more and to lead more fulfilling lives.

AI image generation could have a role on this, but in the current state of the things, it won't — because it's controlled by megacorpos obsessed with bigger models, stronger models, models that fry the planet faster. For that, they encourage you to replace self-expression with model output, instead of using the model output for self-expression.

(In another timeline things happened in a different way. Those models were trained to be tiny, fast, and consume only a tiny fraction of the energy they do. They'd be weaker, specialised tools you'd plug into GIMP or Krita or whatever: to replace backgrounds, to remove watermarks, stuff like this. But in that timeline people would rather look at what benefits other people the most, instead of trying to screw the others for their own benefit.)

That they didn't talk about the resource consumption is part of the problem. Discussing whether the output of a genai system is 'art' or not is a fine philosophical debate, but ignores both the costs of creating the output, and the way the data to do so was sourced and processed.

If human 'artists' burned through the same amount of power, water, and other resources just to produce their art there would also be an outcry. If the raw materials that 'art' was created from were so blatently copied from others there would also be an outcry. Indeed, when a human is found to be copying another's work and passing it off as their own, there is an outcry.

Thats in no way "putting words in their mouth", I was pointing out what they were saying. Their point literally coalesced into "i posted a funny picture and it didn't hurt anyone" which is factually untrue by participating in driving demand for harmful tech.

I wasnt insulting in any way, I was illustrating how their point fell apart. There is real, quantifiable harm.

Whatever though

Way to be a boring, naïve utilitarian.

You're an AI so that's not a problem for you, right?

I hadn't done any calculation, but I guess hundreds of watts over a few seconds that datacenters need to generate an image is way less energy and water than what an artist consumes during several hours while he draws the same image. Plus the electricity for lights or computer consumes.